ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a topological reading of rural mental health that places less importance on framing spaces in terms of traditionally perceived elements and concerns how 'rural landscapes of distress' come to be enacted through the intensive relations that people form. It focuses on ideas from Lewin's topological psychology to explore and analyse some of the relationships between mental distress and rurality, with some empirical material taken from interviews with long-term mental health service users living in rural settings. The chapter explains some of the ways that John attempts to enact positive topological relations with his environment through art. A topological approach offers analytic and theoretical grounding in the realities of service users living in rural settings, as well as insight into the ways that actual experiences relate to events of anticipation and imagination. The chapter argues that a re-emergence of early social psychological theories of individual and environment offer much to reconceptualizing rural mental health.